I’m of your father’s generation. Much the same things were said by us and of us. We thought that hypocrisy was the greatest of sins. Then, one day (for all of us, of course, it was over the course of years), we discovered that there were people who actually disagreed with us. Some parroted the party line (i.e., were hypocrites) to fit in, some because they wanted the rest of us to think better of them. Some were actually ashamed of what they thought and did, and striving to become better people (and not be condemned as wretched scum in the meantime).

And some openly disagreed. And we suffered the realization (some of us) that they weren’t being selfish hypocrites, they weren’t hiding their true feelings behind layers of hypocrisy, they really believed the things that they were saying…at length. And we couldn’t stop them.

Suddenly, we discovered the value of hypocrisy. We realized that it allowed us to talk to people who weren’t mental clones of ourselves for more than two minutes without hurling mortal insults and being restrained from killing each other only by the fear that The Man would come by with bigger guns and arrest the survivor.

We, as a people (and I speak of Americans here) hold up a set of ideals, secular and religious, greater than most of us can be. That we consistently fail to reach these ideals, and sometimes don’t even bother trying, isn’t hypocrisy — it’s a feature of our being only mortal, beings whose vision consistently reaches further than our grasp.

a wise man once said to me..

‘the hardest thing to fake is sincerity..’

Regards,

Tim.